Do Licking County health inspectors eat at the places they inspect?

NEWARK - Are food sanitation inspectors, often called sanitarians, able to separate their personal lives from their work?

Sanitarians conduct inspections of traditional restaurants, school cafeterias and retail food establishments such as convenience stores, carryout and delivery-only restaurants, supermarkets, concession trailers, food trucks, and even vending machines that sell sandwiches and other foods that must be kept at the proper temperature in order to remain safe to eat.

These sanitarians work with the Licking County Health Department's Food Protection Program and aim to protect environmental health through preventing foodborne illness through education and enforcement. And those skills carry over into how sanitarians select places to eat for themselves.

Chad Brown, Director of Environmental Health and registered sanitarian for about 20 years, said, "Usually I go into the restroom of a restaurant first because that's the place they know the public is going to see and if it's not clean, more than likely the rest of the place is not clean either."

Brown mentioned that he has walked out of a restaurant once because of the appearance of its restroom. However, that was not in the county or even in the state of Ohio.

A minimum of two inspections are conducted at every site each year, meaning sanitarians perform more than 1,100 food safety inspections per year. Last year, 2,500 inspections were performed. The inspection reports can be found online at www.lickingcohealth.org.

Holding certain standards for cleanliness, it shouldn't be surprising that sanitarians, such as Brown, are cognizant of how to cook and store food at home.

"You can have cross contamination in your kitchen just as easily as you can in any restaurant. So we take food safety very seriously at home," he said.

Sanitarians spend their days inspecting places and it becomes hard, Brown added, to quantify all of the diseases and outbreaks they've prevented over the years. Licking County hasn't had an outbreak since 1999 largely because of the work that sanitarians do.

About being able to eat at a restaurant as a sanitarian, Brown said, "We're still normal people but when you've been doing inspections for long, you kind of just look around."

Greg Chumney, Environmental Health Program Manager, commented, "I think if you ask any sanitarian about their own personal habits being influenced to some degree by their work, you would get similar answers."

Both Brown and Chumney would agree that the goal of sanitarians is to keep spaces, including their own, sanitized and safe.